Ocean State Resources

Director Comments On

Future Ocean Strategies

Grover Fugate right at the June 3-4 RPB meeting in Mystic, CT. Fugate is the Director of the Coastal Resources Management Council in Rhode Island. “We are not going back to what we previously had,” said Fugate. He said that, “while it might be interesting to consider environmental conditions of the mid-20th-century, a three-foot sea level rise is considered inevitable by some, perhaps by 2050.” Fishermen’s Voice photo

Regional Planning Body member and Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council Director Grover Fugate elaborated on several Ecosystem Based Management comments following the June 3-4 meeting. His focus comes from environmental changes he said he is witnessing in his state. Symptoms of change, for example, include heat stress, evidenced by shell disease, that has been seen in the lobster resource, which is at its southern range in Rhode Island and has all but disappeared in Connecticut.

Fugate cited coastal storms as another example of change that forces communities dealing with storm damage to shift priorities. The loss of coastal wetlands is evidence of the effects of coastal storm damage and reflects the increase in the rate of rising sea levels, he said. Until 2009, there was a historic rate of sea level rise; since then, the rate of increase in sea level rise has doubled, said Fugate.

Fugate noted that a change in one environmental factor, such as coastal storms, can have cascading effects. For example, he said, storm damage may affect the viability of offshore aquaculture. He explained that obtaining a lease is critical to getting financing, in that aquaculture corporations can get permits, but banks want them to have a lease to secure their long-range position for an investment that is large, particularly for finfish aquaculture.

As a result of rapid and cascading changes such as these, Fugate said he would like to see a more flexible ocean plan that can adapt to new realities as they occur.

Discussion at the RPB meeting turned to what a successful plan might look like. Fugate said he didn’t know what a healthy ecosystem looked like anymore. He said it seemed some people want to push habitat back in time. But, said Fugate, ecosystems are changing rapidly and will continue to change for centuries: Some species, for example, might disappear all together. Because of human impacts on the environment and the huge momentum behind environmental change, it might be more useful to look forward, to understand what the ecosystem might become. At this point, he said, human impacts cannot be altered: the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already reached critical mass, and carbon emissions continue to accelerate in Asia and elsewhere.

“We are not going back to what we previously had,” said Fugate. He said that, while it might be interesting to consider environmental conditions of the mid-20th-century, a three-foot sea level rise is considered inevitable by some, perhaps by 2050. Since 1939, he said, sea level has risen eight inches, and coastlines are increasingly impacted by storms of increasing force that push the sea past coastal barriers currently in place. It is unlikely, he said, that ideas such as rebuilding oyster beds, to protect coastlines from storm surges, will have much benefit.

“We should look at what we can do and what we cannot do,” Fugate sad.